Zay
2006-02-27, 22:33
This is a thread from www.newsvine.com, (http://www.newsvine.com,) unfortunately the site is invite only so giving you a link would be pointless.It pretty much kills the notion that ID should be taught in school. My opinion is that evolution is complicated, and the school board doesn't like to feel stupid when the scientists are trying to explain it to them. Either they can bust their asses explaining something complicated, or tell the school board "trust us, we know what we're talking about" Anyways here goes:
Let's let all cats out of any bags: I believe the intelligent design movement (ID) is a bankrupt scientific endeavor. I don't think "scientific" creationism, so called, is any better. In fact, I think that Darwin was right--most naturalistic accounts of the development of species and, indeed, the variety of life now available on earth are able to be explained without reference to a supernatural designer.
I also happen to be a committed Christian that is invested in a community of other Christians--someone that doesn't "play" at faith because I feel guilty for something or because it's the respectable thing to be involved in.
Why would I be so down on the ID movement? Isn't it something that supports Christian belief? Something that "proves" the existence of God?
Put simply, no. Intelligent Design is a highly developed species of natural theology full of factual scientific evidence on the one hand and historically and philosophically immature conjecture on the other hand. Its griffin-like character--a part science, part religion, and part sociological phenomena--makes ID much more flexible and aggressive than other types of natural theology that have developed in the past few thousand years. Whereas from St. Basil in the early Middle Ages to the Bridgewater Treatises in the 1830s natural theology was an offshoot of European enculturated Christianity, today's natural theology has grown up in a world saturated with post-Humean skepticism and a tendency to see the natural world as a commodity.
And it's not as if ID-ers are ignorant of this connection. Natural theology, the 19th century British style, shows up fairly often in ID discourse, usually as a foil against which ID positions itself. "We're not like natural theology," ID-ers say. "Natural theology tried to lead to a deistic version of the Christian God; we're merely interested in destroying naturalism." Here's William Dembski, one of the foremost ID theoreticians on the distinction between ID and natural theology:
quote:[ID] is at once more modest and more powerful than natural theology. From observable features of the natural world, intelligent design infers to an intelligence responsible for those features.... This is not an argument from ignorance. Precisely because of what we know about undirected natural causes and their limitations, science is now in a position to demonstrated design rigorously. (Dembski, "Introduction: Mere Creation," in: _Mere Creation: Science Faith and Intelligent Design_ (IV Press, 1998), 17.)
As Dembski demonstrates here, while ID insists that it is not natural theology, it still uses a type of "God of the Gaps" argument--where science falls short of an explanation, we find God hard at work holding the whole mechanism together. Only ID is not referencing the Christian God or even the Victorians' detached Jehovah-like deity. Instead they're making room for any kind of supernatural being(s) or force(s) to do the work. "We see someone's fingerprints," ID-ers say in effect, "but we can't be certain whose they are."
This should be the first signal to Christians that ID is not all its cracked up to be.
If it is proof of a particular religion's version of God that you are hoping for, that will not be bolstered at all by the concept of Intelligent Design. When evangelicals confront public school boards demanding that time and space for discussions about ID be mandated in the biology classroom, they appear to presume that such a discussion would lead students away from faith in nihilist secularism and thrust them into the open arms of the Christian faith. But those students that are led to devote their lives to Hinduism, Islam, Judaism, or any number of animistic traditions might also be following the vague arrow of the ID argument. ID does not endorse faith in any particular God/gods.
But the second reason why Christians should be suspicious of ID has to do more with science and less with other religions.
Though it is still a fringe hypothesis in the broader biological community, the evolution of developmental systems--known more often by its moniker "evo-devo"--promises to close many of the "gaps" currently exploited by the ID movement. Much more work needs to be done in the evo-devo world. However, some potential solutions to long standing problems in evolutionary theory are at hand.
One problem was identified by the palaeontological community in the 1970s and highlighted by Stephen J. Gould. "Punctuated equilibrium" was Gould's term from observations of the fossil record that seemed to show long periods of relative stasis "punctuated" by short periods of intense change, leaving behind few "link" fossils. The second problem is the one favored by ID proponent Michael Behe and is called, simply "irreducible complexity." According to Behe and others, systems like bacterial flagellum and immuno-defense cascades could not possibly arise through gradual piecemeal change. The beginning and end phases need to be accounted for from the very start of the system. Both of these challenges to the standard neo-Darwinian synthesis seem to be not defeatible by ordinary processes known to evolutionary microbiologists. The ID camp uses these examples to show that Darwin and the century and a half of his followers have all been wrong. How does evo-devo help the evolutionary account?
Significantly, the majority of the proponents for evo-devo come from the world of ecology rather than the various forms of micro-biology. Since ecology focuses on organisms as wholes rather than sacks for cells and their genes, ecologists have discovered the concept of modularity. Briefly, modularity simply means that at the different "levels" of the organism--organism, organ, tissue, intercellular, cellular, intracellular, nucleus--different processes are at work that are unable to be explained simply in reference to the processes at the lower level. Cancer, for instance, cannot be understood simply as a result of accidents at the genetic level. All levels of the organism (and beyond) are involved.
Modularity means that organisms are constantly adjusting to their environment at every level. But evo-devo suggests something even more controversial: namely that phenotype (the external appearance/behaviors of an organism) leads genotype (the genetic component, etc.). In other words, a change to the external surface of an organism might happen not because of genetic change but because of the shifting around of different modular components at each level of the organism. The traceable genetic "hardwiring" follows.
Crudely, then, evo-devo might respond to the arguments of ID by showing how organisms respond quickly and non-randomly to environmental changes without waiting for genetic changes and by reshuffling the components of multiple systems rather than piecemeal additions and subtractions. A flagellum, for instance, might be mocked-up by reorganizing several protein systems both within and without the bacteria itself. A virus-defense system, likewise, could be cobbled together by an organism and refined over time. One of the logical fallacies of the Behean argument is to presume that the only way flagella and immuno-defense systems could work is in their present configurations. Certainly their present configurations could represent a much higher level of refinement than they did to begin with. It does not follow, however, that an organism could not make a serviceable approximation that conferred some advantage in their new environmental conditions.
In the end, the gap argument relied upon by the ID movement--however well it is dressed up in the language of complexity theory and biophysics--is subject to the same constraints and shortcomings as the old natural theology. First, it may defeat metaphysical naturalism (though this is a claim I doubt) but it does not lead one to faith in God, let alone Christ. Second, given the new evidence introduced by evo-devo, it is only a matter of time before the seeming gaps in the evolutionary account are shrunken considerably. Then like a Charles Darwin just home from his Beagle voyage, ID-ers will have to decide whether to forgo faith in God altogether or take seriously the words of St. Paul: "faith is the evidence of things not seen."
Let's let all cats out of any bags: I believe the intelligent design movement (ID) is a bankrupt scientific endeavor. I don't think "scientific" creationism, so called, is any better. In fact, I think that Darwin was right--most naturalistic accounts of the development of species and, indeed, the variety of life now available on earth are able to be explained without reference to a supernatural designer.
I also happen to be a committed Christian that is invested in a community of other Christians--someone that doesn't "play" at faith because I feel guilty for something or because it's the respectable thing to be involved in.
Why would I be so down on the ID movement? Isn't it something that supports Christian belief? Something that "proves" the existence of God?
Put simply, no. Intelligent Design is a highly developed species of natural theology full of factual scientific evidence on the one hand and historically and philosophically immature conjecture on the other hand. Its griffin-like character--a part science, part religion, and part sociological phenomena--makes ID much more flexible and aggressive than other types of natural theology that have developed in the past few thousand years. Whereas from St. Basil in the early Middle Ages to the Bridgewater Treatises in the 1830s natural theology was an offshoot of European enculturated Christianity, today's natural theology has grown up in a world saturated with post-Humean skepticism and a tendency to see the natural world as a commodity.
And it's not as if ID-ers are ignorant of this connection. Natural theology, the 19th century British style, shows up fairly often in ID discourse, usually as a foil against which ID positions itself. "We're not like natural theology," ID-ers say. "Natural theology tried to lead to a deistic version of the Christian God; we're merely interested in destroying naturalism." Here's William Dembski, one of the foremost ID theoreticians on the distinction between ID and natural theology:
quote:[ID] is at once more modest and more powerful than natural theology. From observable features of the natural world, intelligent design infers to an intelligence responsible for those features.... This is not an argument from ignorance. Precisely because of what we know about undirected natural causes and their limitations, science is now in a position to demonstrated design rigorously. (Dembski, "Introduction: Mere Creation," in: _Mere Creation: Science Faith and Intelligent Design_ (IV Press, 1998), 17.)
As Dembski demonstrates here, while ID insists that it is not natural theology, it still uses a type of "God of the Gaps" argument--where science falls short of an explanation, we find God hard at work holding the whole mechanism together. Only ID is not referencing the Christian God or even the Victorians' detached Jehovah-like deity. Instead they're making room for any kind of supernatural being(s) or force(s) to do the work. "We see someone's fingerprints," ID-ers say in effect, "but we can't be certain whose they are."
This should be the first signal to Christians that ID is not all its cracked up to be.
If it is proof of a particular religion's version of God that you are hoping for, that will not be bolstered at all by the concept of Intelligent Design. When evangelicals confront public school boards demanding that time and space for discussions about ID be mandated in the biology classroom, they appear to presume that such a discussion would lead students away from faith in nihilist secularism and thrust them into the open arms of the Christian faith. But those students that are led to devote their lives to Hinduism, Islam, Judaism, or any number of animistic traditions might also be following the vague arrow of the ID argument. ID does not endorse faith in any particular God/gods.
But the second reason why Christians should be suspicious of ID has to do more with science and less with other religions.
Though it is still a fringe hypothesis in the broader biological community, the evolution of developmental systems--known more often by its moniker "evo-devo"--promises to close many of the "gaps" currently exploited by the ID movement. Much more work needs to be done in the evo-devo world. However, some potential solutions to long standing problems in evolutionary theory are at hand.
One problem was identified by the palaeontological community in the 1970s and highlighted by Stephen J. Gould. "Punctuated equilibrium" was Gould's term from observations of the fossil record that seemed to show long periods of relative stasis "punctuated" by short periods of intense change, leaving behind few "link" fossils. The second problem is the one favored by ID proponent Michael Behe and is called, simply "irreducible complexity." According to Behe and others, systems like bacterial flagellum and immuno-defense cascades could not possibly arise through gradual piecemeal change. The beginning and end phases need to be accounted for from the very start of the system. Both of these challenges to the standard neo-Darwinian synthesis seem to be not defeatible by ordinary processes known to evolutionary microbiologists. The ID camp uses these examples to show that Darwin and the century and a half of his followers have all been wrong. How does evo-devo help the evolutionary account?
Significantly, the majority of the proponents for evo-devo come from the world of ecology rather than the various forms of micro-biology. Since ecology focuses on organisms as wholes rather than sacks for cells and their genes, ecologists have discovered the concept of modularity. Briefly, modularity simply means that at the different "levels" of the organism--organism, organ, tissue, intercellular, cellular, intracellular, nucleus--different processes are at work that are unable to be explained simply in reference to the processes at the lower level. Cancer, for instance, cannot be understood simply as a result of accidents at the genetic level. All levels of the organism (and beyond) are involved.
Modularity means that organisms are constantly adjusting to their environment at every level. But evo-devo suggests something even more controversial: namely that phenotype (the external appearance/behaviors of an organism) leads genotype (the genetic component, etc.). In other words, a change to the external surface of an organism might happen not because of genetic change but because of the shifting around of different modular components at each level of the organism. The traceable genetic "hardwiring" follows.
Crudely, then, evo-devo might respond to the arguments of ID by showing how organisms respond quickly and non-randomly to environmental changes without waiting for genetic changes and by reshuffling the components of multiple systems rather than piecemeal additions and subtractions. A flagellum, for instance, might be mocked-up by reorganizing several protein systems both within and without the bacteria itself. A virus-defense system, likewise, could be cobbled together by an organism and refined over time. One of the logical fallacies of the Behean argument is to presume that the only way flagella and immuno-defense systems could work is in their present configurations. Certainly their present configurations could represent a much higher level of refinement than they did to begin with. It does not follow, however, that an organism could not make a serviceable approximation that conferred some advantage in their new environmental conditions.
In the end, the gap argument relied upon by the ID movement--however well it is dressed up in the language of complexity theory and biophysics--is subject to the same constraints and shortcomings as the old natural theology. First, it may defeat metaphysical naturalism (though this is a claim I doubt) but it does not lead one to faith in God, let alone Christ. Second, given the new evidence introduced by evo-devo, it is only a matter of time before the seeming gaps in the evolutionary account are shrunken considerably. Then like a Charles Darwin just home from his Beagle voyage, ID-ers will have to decide whether to forgo faith in God altogether or take seriously the words of St. Paul: "faith is the evidence of things not seen."